No I meant what I said. I should qualify that what I meant was a choir that sang each week in a C of E church. I was told there were only a handful of such choirs in the Manchester diocese at that time - I sang in what I believe was the best of them, and it was significantly inferior both in repertoire and standard to the college choir I'd previously been in at Cambridge (which at the time I would have put in the 'third rank' out of about five). No one started any petitions about the lack of opportunities for women to sing church music to a high standard, though maybe they should have done.
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I’m sure that’s true but it has everything to do with (some ) Oxbridge Colleges sitting at the apex of a system designed to produce high quality church music. A process that is largely tied in with the English Public school and college Choral scholarship system. And that’s underpinned by Colleges like Trinity , Kings , St Johns (Ox and Cam) New College and Christ Church which , per capita are amongst the most generously endowed education establishments in the world. I’m guessing Manchester Diocese has barely got two brass candlesticks to run together . Nor should it if you follow the teachings of its highly influential spiritual leader.Originally posted by mopsus View PostComment
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It's notable that unlike with similar colleges, the main St John's choir is not even mentioned once in the statutes. It exists only because to abolish it would adversely affect the reputation of the college (and of those individuals who made the decision). Aside from reputation there is no other impediment to dismantling it (as was tried both before and after Guest's term).
Of course there's now a solution newly open to the college whereby they could accede to the lobbying from all the big names in the choral world for soprano opportunities at St John's, whilst at the same time retaining in name but effectively dismantling the main choir...Comment
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And close down a school? Good luck with the reputational fallout from doing that …..Comment
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No need to close the school. They conveniently hived it off in 2021 to a separate subsidiary charitable company. It would now be a trivial matter to retain it without taking choristers, or dispose of it as they saw fit.Originally posted by Kingfisher View PostComment
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Actually there's one very wealthy church in the Diocese - Sacred Trinity, Salford, which has a huge endowment. There was a CE broadcast using the Manchester Choral Scholars from there not long ago. One thing that could have been petitioned about - without spending any additional money - was making the Voluntary Choir at the Cathedral mixed-voice. This has now happened, although I believe the reason was the difficulty of recruiting boys (no girls ever sang in it as far as I know) rather than giving opportunities to adult sopranos. The repertoire at the church I sang in also appears to have got more ambitious. We had a DoM and an organ scholar who (like most things in Manchester at the time) was sponsored by Boddingtons. But your post does raise the question: is it only possible to sing church music liturgically to a high standard (if you're a soprano) if you have a wealthy educational establishment behind you?Originally posted by Ein Heldenleben View Post
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That Mopsus is a very interesting question and one I don’t have an answer to. I think it would be possible to create such a choir but the current system is largely underpinned by wealthy public schools, Oxbridge Colleges and the English Cathedral system. The latter two sometimes have schools linked into them - like Magdalen Choir School.Originally posted by mopsus View Post
The same is also true of Cricket to some extent . If we are to have diversity and equality of opportunity it’s going to need more than a few token scholarships.
Incidentally music has become a bit of a key to unlocking reduced fees - a good young singer and/ or with say grade 8 instrument in their early teens stands a good chance of massively reduced fees. There’s a bit of a cottage industry in tutoring 8- 13 year olds to get them to scholarship performance standard. Not an opportunity available to those unable to pay £50 per hour plus in one to one tuition.
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Well, there are cathedrals, such as Norwich and Guildford, that have girl choristers drawn from local schools,rather than from a single fee-paying school, but I don't know if that's what you mean?Originally posted by mopsus View Post
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To be clear, nobody knows the true answer to why this decision was taken. Also, strictly speaking, the decision seems to have been taken collectively by the College Council rather than any one particular individual, although the College Council is obviously led by the Master.
This particular Master has been in post ever since the previous (very supportive) Master died, about four years ago. I'm led to understand that she has never attended any services, concerts, events or rehearsals with SJV and has shown little obvious interest in informing herself about them and what they do and how they do it.
For balance, it has to be said that, under this Master's leadership, support for the "actual" College Choir (i.e. the world-famous St John's College Choir) has also been somewhat shallow beyond the fact that they are (justifiably) world-famous. The move to gender parity in the (child) chorister ranks in the "actual" College Choir has of course been admirable, and long overdue, and in itself it's also a positive move that spaces in the choir for altos are now explicitly open to (adult) singers regardless of their gender. But there is clearly no understanding (or at least, worse, no acknowledgement) among the College's management that providing openings for perhaps three women, all of them singing alto, by no means constitutes providing equal quality-choral-singing opportunities for all of the student body, especially if only one of those three female altos happens to be a St John's student. "We don’t need two mixed choirs" is blatantly false.
As it happens, this is of course a conundrum for all choral foundations which feature child choristers. There are now cathedral choirs which unapologetically maintain two sets of child-chorister trebles (or indeed one unified mixed-sex set) while also regularly featuring under their umbrella at least some all-adult SATB services with adult sopranos from the "expanded choir" pool of deputies and extra singers. (I'm not talking about cathedral voluntary choirs here, although of course they are also part of the equation.) As it happens, these past couple of years St John's has been THE ONLY Cambridge college which has provided very-high-quality regular choral-singing opportunities for boys and girls and men and women, precisely thanks to having its two choirs: the "actual" College Choir on the one hand (with boys-and-girls-together and men plus a couple of women on alto), and St John's Voices on the other hand (an all-adult mixed choir).
One should not speculate, and I stress that I may be completely wrong, but it is hinted that the idea of making adult sopranos and boy-and-girl child choristers sing together as one section as a matter of course may have been seriously mooted at some point by the College authorities for the "actual" College Choir. (That might sound ideal to those who have little or no knowledge or understanding of choirs or music or education or safeguarding, but is fraught with logistical nightmares; if it worked, everybody would be doing it…) Again, I may be completely wrong, but I understand that some among the College authorities might have felt it preferable to "solve" the chorister gender parity issue by getting rid of child choristers altogether. Admittedly, that is an idea which some in the choral community seem to favour, but it would in fact be a colossal mistake for the general music-educational and long-term-individual-developmental ecosystem, particularly if applied to one of the very finest teams of child choristers in the entire world, which that of St John's College Choir is. We must bear in mind also that the "actual" College Choir and SJV have never been in opposition: they have always actively supported each other, and rightly so…
If I'm being totally honest, the moral of this story is that nobody should be naive enough about their responsibilities to take on the burden of running a university college without genuinely appreciating and understanding what the college is and how delicate and fragile and vulnerable to (mis)managerial abuse it will prove to be, and that destroyed institutions and reputations take decades to recover. The strength of feeling from so many in the musical community all around the world about this should give them cause to take a look at themselves, but perhaps the "executive management" class are no longer accustomed to recognising their own accountability to the rest of us, and that is to the massive detriment of the very notion of collegiality. It smacks of feudalism.
I should point out that I am not a Johnian nor a regular member of St John's Voices, but the professional-musical ecosystem in "the greater Cambridge area" is close-knit, and we all talk to each other. I have joined St John's Voices as an extra singer on a couple of occasions, namely for their Chesnokov recording project in 2022 and for the Rachmaninov-and-Golovanov recording project which has been in planning ever since and finally happened from 16th to 18th March: one the most extraordinary recording sessions I have ever been involved in. This very nearly had to be abandoned at a couple of weeks' notice when the Director of St John's Voices was instructed to dismiss several of the regular members of the choir with immediate effect. (From year to year the core of SJV was ALWAYS current St John's students, and they ALWAYS had priority in gaining places in the choir, but the remaining places went to those from the wider musical ecosystem of Cambridge who would most benefit from involvement and were most keen to be involved. As such, SJV has been an invaluable high-quality liturgical-choral opportunity not just for St John's students who are dedicated liturgical-choral singers and happen to be women, but also for dedicated adult liturgical-choral singers of any gender for whom the higher number of regular services in the schedules of most other college choirs would not be an option.) But there was a stay of execution until after the recording project was completed. So the regular singers already knew that some of them were about to be ejected from the choir against the Director's will, but at the end of the recording it was left to the Director himself to break it to them that after the next term the choir would be completely shut down, and that he had been told this on the day of the pre-recording concert (last Thursday) but had had no choice but to keep it from them until the recording was over. And all along, these past eleven years, the Director of St John's Voices has run it exactly as encouraged by the PREVIOUS Master, who engaged his services to establish and run an all-adult mixed-sex choir, parallel and complementary to the "actual" College Choir, in the first place.
I know one shouldn't get personal about these things, but the Director is himself a St John's alumnus and was himself a St John's chorister and choral scholar, and has been part of the broader St John's family since he was four (which happens to be when we first met, in Kindergarten!). I might not be an SJV regular or indeed a Johnian, but this whole episode is profoundly traumatic for those involved and is a classic example of the worst side of institutions, as indeed is the fact that they put the official announcement in the name of the College's (and "actual" College Choir's) recently-arrived Director of Music, although one can only presume that his hands were tied. One can also only presume that this decision had to be rushed through before the arrival of the next Dean of Chapel, who is currently Canon Precentor at York Minster and herself a keen singer and supporter of high-quality choral music. One can only guess that she would not have been very happy about the decision to axe the College's high-quality all-adult mixed choir, to say the least…
I should also stress that the College has now rushed out a document outlining their (supposed) plans for college music going forward, but in among the apparently worthy aims and objectives in the interests of diversity and inclusion (and of course there is a lot of improvement to do on that front) there is little that sounds definite and specific, whereas the decision to close down SJV is certainly very specific. There is indeed a crisis of music and arts education in this country, and it is indeed the case that participation and attainment are very heavily skewed towards those from relatively privileged backgrounds. But the real solution is for there to be far more high-quality music and arts provision from the youngest age in ALL schools, and real encouragement for children and young people to get actively involved and stretch themselves. The stigma attached to liturgical-choral music on the grounds of it being "socially elitist" and "only for privileged people" is self-evidently a self-fulfilling vicious circle. It's arguably an exaggeration to say that SJV has been a major catalyst for access, but in its own way it has done its own bit to counteract the barriers of exclusion in the liturgical-choral world. As a professional cathedral musician, I always feel we should be doing more to counteract those barriers of exclusion, so that more people get the opportunity to be involved, without patronising concessions or dumbing down, to everybody's benefit. Quite apart from everything else, from our perspective, closing SJV is obviously a move in the wrong direction.
Now I shall be quiet!Comment
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Well, quite. I do get very irate about accusations of classical music being elitist. It's sheer inverted snobbery. The only people who call music elitist are those with an axe to grind. No musician wants music to be elitist. In the city where I live the Head of Music at one of the leading secondary schools has allowed the school orchestra to disband because he only likes shows and believes classical music to be elitist. Worse, a retired music teacher I know told me recently of a Head of Music elsewhere who could not even read music. If you go around teaching kids that music is elitist they will grow up believing it.Originally posted by Quilisma View Post
The long-standing problem has been that our governments have not seen classical music education as at all important—there is little political mileage in it. If our government ministers have such little regard for investing in musical education and opportunities, is it any wonder if the same attitude filters down to the governing bodies of university colleges?
(Sir Keir Starmer is musical and seems prepared to commit to the creative arts, but would he be able to find the money to invest in it...?)Comment
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Thanks Quilisma for the excellent sit rep and analysis.Comment
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Pleasure!Originally posted by Ein Heldenleben View Post
I suspect everyone on this forum knows this very well already, but it might be worth going over the context that brought rise to SJV in the first place. Until 1970 most of the colleges in Cambridge were all-male (the rest were all-female), and a couple of them had cathedral-style college choirs with boy choristers and choral scholars (until the 1920s, lay clerks), which sang Evensong almost every day. Trinity finally lost its boy choristers in the 1960s, I think; perhaps earlier? King's and St John's became world-famous in the second half of the twentieth century. Many of the other colleges didn't have "serious" choirs back then. Since 1970 all of the previously all-male colleges have gone mixed, and all of the colleges have a choir, almost all of them mixed and most of them very good and very ambitious. Thus it has become the absolute norm for every college to have a good choir which provides singing opportunities for both male and female students in the college in the first instance. That left King's and St John's as mixed colleges whose college choirs were still all-male, with boy choristers on the soprano/treble lines. (Jesus College uniquely maintains two separate soprano/treble sections: adult female soprano choral scholars on some days, and boy choristers, recruited from various schools, on other days.) A couple of decades ago, King's started a second choir of mixed adult voices to provide Evensong on the College Choir's day off (Monday), but more importantly to provide an opportunity, which hitherto didn't exist, for female students at King's to sing in a good choir in King's Chapel. St John's followed suit in 2013, for exactly the same reason, and St John's Voices was born. This meant that every mixed college now had a mixed adult choir which provided at least some opportunities for students to sing in their college chapel regardless of their gender. Then about two years ago St John's College Choir opened up to girl choristers and to female altos. (The model of maintaining two separate sets of choristers, boys and girls, as at most cathedrals, was seriously considered, but in that particular case it ultimately proved logistically and financially more viable to have one single mixed team of choristers.) But female (adult) students can only be part of St John's College Choir if they happen to sing alto, because in that choir the soprano/treble parts are still sung by child choristers, albeit now boys and girls together. So St John's Voices is still absolutely necessary, and closing it down is clearly wrong and would leave St John's College as the only college where female students will not have any opportunity to sing in a college choir in their own college chapel (unless they happen to be altos and very lucky to gain one of very few places in the very small alto section).
Meanwhile, according to the latest information the authorities at St John's College somehow gained access to all of the St John's Voices social media channels and cut off SJV's access to them. The SJV campaigners initially reported this via other means on social media, but they then tried to remove all references to it, as if it was all actually some kind of misunderstanding. Perhaps they feared the College might take punitive measures if it became known that the College had hijacked and confiscated their social media outlets. But it was too late for the College to suppress it, because word was already out, and they were not minded effectively to collude in suppressing it, so they then confirmed that it was indeed true. Apparently "Save SJV" accounts have now been created by people who are already beyond the jurisdictional reach of St John's College, and they have stressed that no remaining SJV members or current St John's College students have any part in operating those "Save SJV" accounts.
It seems the College's new Strategic Plan for Music has been under discussion for quite a while, and the idea to give support and backing to a more diverse range of musical interests within the College, and particularly to make funds available for music tuition for students, is broadly welcomed by everybody. But how this has been conflated with shutting down SJV is not at all clear, as SJV's costs are relatively low. (SJV's Director is only on a part-time contract, alongside his other main role as Director of Music at Emmanuel College, and all the SJV singers are unpaid volunteers.) There is presumably still disquiet among many Fellows (not just at St John's) at the existence of a working Chapel at the heart of college life, and at the College Choir and SJV both being inextricably linked with it and with acts of worship within a specific denomination of a specific religion. That being said, it's obviously the case that by no means all members of the College Choir or of SJV (or indeed of any other College Choir) are practising Anglicans, or indeed practising Christians, and there have been many in choirs like these who are of different denominations or indeed different religions, or indeed none. This is all well understood and accepted by all involved, of course. In fact, I remember from my own time as a student that the (typically Evangelical) Christian Unions often took a distinctly hostile view towards the formal worship in the college chapels, on the grounds that "all sorts of people" attend those services, often "for the wrong reasons", and that that supposedly makes it "invalid". As a cathedral musician I'm never going to agree with that analysis, of course: precisely the opposite, the great beauty of Evensong is that everybody really is welcome to come, or not to come, at any time, and that for the uninitiated this is arguably much less intimidating and alienating than being smothered in coercive individualised testimonial...
There are also alarming murmurings about financial support and bursaries for students in hardship being cut in favour of a number of more eye-catching funded scholarships for a number of people from specific underprivileged backgrounds (which strikes me as being rather patronising and suspiciously PR-oriented), while the number of highly-paid "executive" positions in the management is apparently increasing, and while the students' accommodation rent rates, already among the most expensive for in-college student accommodation in Cambridge, are being further hiked up by a rumoured eyewateringly unreasonable massively-above-inflation percentage.
It's no wonder the lovely people of SJV are not at all happy about the situation. But those running the College might not be easily persuaded to reconsider. One wonders if they might even suppress and silence the outstanding Golovanov recording, which would be massively ironic given that Golovanov's liturgical compositional career was suppressed and silenced by the Soviet régime, but that he continued composing this amazing music in secret for his own private purposes anyway, which was potentially very dangerous under Stalin...Comment
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Q. If #27 post is you keeping “quiet” (post #24) what are you like when riled ?
Seriously great stuff . And very well written . You should do a Guardian long read on the issues it all throws up . Or maybe it’s more up the Telegraph’s street. Might as well make a few quid out of it..
I wouldn’t get paranoid. In my experience of decades of investigative journalism it’s nearly always cockup rather then conspiracy. I will say one thing : dealing with the COE and particularly Cathedrals has always been a massive pain in the neck and I don’t suppose snooty Cambridge colleges are any better.
on a paranoia note though you have given quite a lot of identity clues if you really think there’s a witch hunt in the offing …
The idea of them suppressing the final recording did have me chuckling. If that happens you have to flash mob and sing the thing outside the College gates after inviting the world media along.
jeez this has the makings of a Netflix drama series , “The Choir They Couldn’t Kill.”
Sorry to be flippant - seriously it’s a disgrace,
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Ha, yes, I know I said I was going to keep quiet... But then more things came to light, and I simply couldn't avoid metaphorically mouthing off about them. I stress that I'm not directly personally involved, and am not and never have been subject to the jurisdiction of St John's College (or indeed SJV), so am not subject to any reasonable interpretation of a requirement for silence. I've always been much more favourably disposed towards St John's than is traditionally the norm for non-Johnian Cantabrigians, because I've always been an enormous fan of St John's College Choir and latterly also St John's Voices, so there must have been quite a lot that the College has tended to get absolutely right, and I wouldn't dream of slagging them off or being rude about them in any way. All the more reason to hope earnestly that this decision will be overturned and the damage rectified! Anyway, I've said what I needed to say now. Nothing more to see here! Move along down inside the carriage now, please!Originally posted by Ein Heldenleben View PostComment
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If there happen to be any Johnian readers of this forum
who are based in Singapore and Hong Kong, you might wish to ask the Master some pertinent questions about this disgraceful decision when she pitches up to the forthcoming events - at which she will presumably ask you for financial support for the College’s activities.Comment
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